[oberlist] Fwd: Marius Bercea's Concrete Gardens at François Ghebaly Gallery

Thu Apr 19 00:26:47 CEST 2012

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From: Art-Agenda <art-agenda la mailer.e-flux.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Subject: Marius Bercea's Concrete Gardens at François Ghebaly Gallery
To: igor.mocanu la gmail.com

  April 17, 2012 [image:
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 [image:
dotted_line.gif]  François Ghebaly Gallery Follow us[image:
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 [image:
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 Marius
Bercea, *Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk*, 2011.
Oil on Canvas, 112 x 152".  Marius Bercea
*Concrete Gardens*

14 April–26 May 2012

*François Ghebaly Gallery*
2600 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

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The city square is deserted. There's no one strolling past the columns of
the former municipal building, no one on the bandstand. The heat that
pulsates on the canvas is keeping everybody at home in this languid summer
evening. The modernist pyramid, vaguely redolent of Le Corbusier and Oscar
Niemeyer, is a monumental relic of the failed utopias of the 20th
century. *Imperfect
Pearls Shimmer at Dusk *(2011) could be in any nondescript ex-USSR city.
Although Marius Bercea does not specify the location, the artist is clearly
picturing a place lived in, used by its invisible inhabitants to the point
of exhaustion. The three diving statues invite the eye to the vast sand
expanse, absurdly tropical with its exotic flowers and white promotional
umbrellas. There's a distinct yearning for escape from this place saturated
with memories—fed 24/7 by the lurid billboards gleaming on the horizon.

Bercea belongs to the generation of Romanians who grew up under Ceausescu's
regime, and saw their country's rapid transformation after the dissolution
of the Communist Bloc. In some of his earlier paintings, the artist tackled
real and imagined childhood recollections: the formulaic school
photographs, games, and picnics of faceless kids, wrapped in the yellowish,
noxious air that hung over Eastern Europe after Chernobyl's nuclear
disaster. With this new series, described by the artist as a "collective
urban portrait," Bercea deals with what happened immediately after 1989,
with the arrival of Western capitalism; neon slowly taking over the
cityscape, its fluorescent hues slapped on the decaying concrete, the
shifting sense of what is normal, what should be aspired to, and how it
could, or should, be obtained. Although it eschews direct narratives,
*Imperfect
Pearls Shimmer at Dusk *evinces a sense of being in flux. Advertising blurs
progressively emerge from the brushstrokes' rich interlays; Romania's
transition is happening on the canvas under our eyes.

Bercea bathes his built-up environments in the suspended atmosphere of
twilight: dawn of an era, dusk of another. He uses these warm, vaguely
threatening skies for a forensic study of light and its effects, walking in
the footsteps of the great landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Claude
Monet. The heavy purple offsets the street light boxes' electric glow and
the lush emerald leaves quivering in the breeze; it enlivens the dusty
grays of the buildings, temporarily smoothing their fast-coming
obsolescence. Most of the edifices presented in this series exist somewhere
in the real world, at least in part. Bercea has collected different bits of
buildings, combined and reconfigured them to create this recent-past
dystopia, a condensed version of all his sources. With its top lost in the
heavens, the pyramid in *Imperfect Pearls *has something of a Tower of
Babel — an overbearing icon of men's folly, past and to come.

Critic and curator Jane Neal describes Bercea's painting as a kind of
archaeology, a process of navigating layers of time, space, colors, and
semantics encrusted on the canvas. While the conceptual background of each
piece in this new series is too pregnant to ignore, it's also a ploy for
the artist to stretch further his ongoing exploration of the medium, his
tireless testing of Albertian perspective, and experiments with the
dilatation and refraction of light on the picture plane. Bercea's practice
is decidedly figurative, and yet it also freely taps into a gestural
tradition more readily associated with abstraction. Dotted throughout the
images — indeed *making *the images — countless impetuous impastos stand as
so many pieces of bravura, only fully appreciable up close. These
idiosyncratic touches reinforce the sense of the artist's presence; his
personal experience is rendered palpable through the materiality of the
paint. But Bercea always aims beyond intricacies of the specific. In these
canvases, he recounts the history of a part of the world as it struggles to
find its place in a new geo-political landscape.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info la ghebaly.com, or
visit our website
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-- 
Igor Mocanu

(+40) 722 85 34 05
igor.mocanu la gmail.com
http://igormocanu.wordpress.com/
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